All things considered … I’d rather be in Kansas.
His first alien sunrise crept in through a heavy, oily-damp, twilight mist that seemed to slither—as if alive—around Twenty-Nine Palms High School. The fog came in waves that parted to flow past a dozen or so Spanish style buildings, perched atop a perfectly cylindrical plateau—a stony plug that had been stolen from a California town and plopped down here, less than a day before.
From atop the school’s mission-style bell tower, Mark Bamford stared across the cracked and buckled pavement of Rimpau Avenue and still-smoldering ruins of an Arco station, past a sudden, curving precipice and down to a sweeping vale of eerie, other-world timberland. A wild tangle of pale-green forest giants, festooned with crimson vines, surrounded the campus in all directions.
A day ago, the distant view from this stucco tower would have been all dunes and sand, dotted with the spindly Joshua trees of California’s Mojave desert. But all of that had changed.
We’re not in California anymore. Or America, or on Earth.
Heck. All things considered, I’d rather be somewhere in the Solar System.
As dawn-light slowly built, he started making out features farther away. Miles beyond the red-and-lime jungle—on a bearing which the Physics Club guys were now calling South—there jutted a line of sheer, almost-glassy, purple cliffs, a high ridge of iridescent stone that slanted away toward serried ranges of serrated mountains. In the opposite direction, a rolling landscape, dotted with meadows, climbed gradually toward more mountains. And “westward”? Well—the jungle descended into a deep haze, with vague hints at a boundary that might be some far-off shoreline, perhaps even a sea.
By comparison, the plug that had been scooped up from Earth and plonked down here—a disk less than half a kilometer across, centered on the high school—seemed pathetically small, like a dinghy on a vast and dangerous ocean. This remnant of Earth—“The Rock” as folks were calling it—was home.
At sixteen—almost seventeen—Mark had more experience at being out of his element than most, following his widower father through U.S. military bases all over the Americas, Africa and Asia, where Mark learned to improvise, adapting to new cultures and acquiring new skills. But no Earthly experience could have prepared him—or anyone—for what happened yesterday.
It’s been less than day? It feels like a week, a lifetime, since …
… since a traumatic snatch, when the alien Garubis dropped some kind of force field from their hovering ship, an interstellar kidnapping whose magnitude was still just sinking in. Hurled across the cosmos and then dropped onto a strange planet, those unlucky enough to be caught on the school grounds, or neighboring blocks, were coping in various ways. Mostly by cowering in the school gymnasium or dim classrooms with the blinds drawn, especially after last night’s harrowing attack by horrible bat-things.
But humans come in many personality types. And Mark wasn’t one to keep still, for long. So, he had volunteered for pre-dawn lookout duty, despite muscles that still ached from racing all over the place yesterday, helping to salvage supplies from the gas station and grocery store.
‘Muscle’ is what I’m good for, he thought. Alex did most of the quick thinking. Thanks to her, we managed to save some gas and most of the frozen food.
All that scurrying about—including hard, dangerous labor—would have been exhausting enough. Only then came last night’s frenetic battle with swarms of nasty, biting varmints. Fortunately, none of the awful creatures had been seen since midnight. Ms. O’Brien, the biology teacher, declared her confidence that they were nocturnal. Mark knew he ought to feel better, as the dawn mist began to fade and real daylight spread. But he was haunted with bitter pangs, from last night’s combat.
How many died? I know of at least two … and a couple more who are barely hanging on.
Some credited Mark’s quick thinking with saving lives. But not everyone’s. Stark memories loomed—of one little freshman, lying in a pool of blood, while alien parasites crowded in to lap it up.
Is that why you volunteered to take this watch shift? Out of guilt?
Fortunately, there was no time to fret over that question, because then his relief arrived.
“Howzit, Bam?” asked Dave McCarty, clambering up a narrow stair into the tower, then leaning out to inhale scents of a strange new world. McCarty clearly loved it up here, soaking in the view.
“Zit happens,” Mark replied, with a shrug. Dave ran with the leather crowd. He was into Harleys and thrash metal, none of which appealed to Mark, but the two of them weren't unfriendly.
“See any new kinds of bird-things?” McCarty asked. He opened his scroll-tablet by pulling apart the two rods, and aimed it outward, turning slowly to scan the horizon. Behind him, another figure climbed the stair—a junior named Penny Hill, carrying a pair of binoculars that looked huge in her petite hands. But she swung them up with confidence, scanning the horizon with evident joy. Great. Another enthusiast.
Like Dave, she was clearly loving every minute of this adventure. Out of the total population of The Rock—more than a thousand human souls—Mark figured a few hundred zealots were like this. Despite every setback and even bat-thing attacks, they just couldn't wait to make this planet their own—a kind of personality that might prove crazy, or crazy-useful, in the days ahead.
For now, though, Mark only had attention for their tiny slice of Earth. From fifty feet up, he could see just how much—how little—of their town had been carved up and deposited unknown light years away from home—a disk maybe four hundred meters across—or less than half a dozen football fields—and ten meters thick. Their island was just big enough to encompass most of the high school grounds, a few homes and small businesses, including two-thirds of the Food King.
Thank God for that last stroke of luck. And let’s hope we’re making the best of it.
Dave sniffed and pulled back from him. “Dude, you still reek of gasoline! I saw what you and Alex did, climbing down to the pipes and saving some of the stuff spilling from the Arco Station. That was some fast thinking … but …”
“But, what?”
“But why don't you take a shower or something, before someone makes a spark and you blow up?”
Mark would like nothing better than a shower. He shook his head, though. This valley was covered in jungle—the trees and underbrush looked as thick as rain forest—but there wasn't a cloud in the sky. They couldn't be sure when or if there would be a storm. And what if any downpour wasn't safe to drink?
“Shouldn’t waste water,” he said.
“Water. Right. Bummer.” Dave nodded. “Still, that was great, what you and Alex did. And then running around after dark, saving those kids from bats? Everybody's talking about it.”
Mark nodded, accepting the compliment, but wondered. What did I really do, after the Big Snatch, when that awful noise stopped and everyone stood up … staring around ourselves at the Great Gift that the Garubis gave us? I tried to cope, I guess … Sometimes you don't have a second to think. You just act.
“Not everyone feels that way,” he answered. “Some think it’s my fault that we were brought here.”
Dave finished his scan of the surroundings and lowered his tablet.
“You mean on account of how you and Alex saved Na-Bistaka’s life? Alerting NASA and the feds that an honest-to-gosh alien was being held prisoner by some dumb-ass high school students?”
Rescued from a dopey cabal of nerds and jocks, the Garubis emissary hadn’t spared even a moment to express gratitude. Right-off, Na-Bistaka demanded that the authorities help him to ‘phone home,’ setting in motion a course of events that led, months later, to the aliens’ “gift”… scooping up Twenty-Nine Palms High and teleporting it far across interstellar space.
To Dave and Penny, that made Mark a first class hero. Others had a darker opinion.
“Colin Gornet and a lot of others blame me.”
“Well, you’re not responsible for the opinions of idiots,” came a new voice from the stair.
Alexandra Behr emerged—tall and lanky and not quite sixteen, she was the closest thing to a sister that Mark figured he’d ever have.
“It’s getting crowded up here,” he grumbled.
“Then come on down, Bam,” Alex answered. “Your shift is over and they’re getting ready to serve breakfast.”
That reminded him of the yawning cavity in his stomach, and how food would be a critical problem, today. And possibly for the rest of our short lives, if we don’t solve it soon.
“You guys’ll be all right?” he asked Penny and Dave. Stupid question. They were already peering across the alien landscape, eagerly pointing at features revealed by long, dawn shadows. Proof that some kinds of human … and probably all kinds … were simply crazy. And my own variety might be the worst of all.
“Come on, Bam.” Alex jabbed him out of his thoughts with an elbow and pointed him toward the stair. “Let’s get some food. I figure it’s gonna be a very long day.”